Article on Knowm Inc.’s Launch from The Platform

If you think that Hewlett-Packard is disappointed about the delays in getting the memristor to market, so is a tenacious inventor who has been working at the confluence of electronics and machine learning. Alex Nugent, who has been involved in a number of machine learning projects with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, including the SyNAPSE project that was eventually shepherded through several phases of development by IBM, has uncloaked a startup dedicated to using memristors at the heart of a new kind of analog computer that does what he says is a better job mimicking the function of the human brain.

Earlier this year, IBM Research was showing off a prototype neuromorphic computing system based on phase change memory – which has proved to be as difficult to make in production quantities as the memristors that HP and Nugent favor. Last summer, IBM finished off the SyNAPSE project with DARPA with partner Samsung to create a 4,096 core processor, called TrueNorth, that is capable of simulating millions of neurons. So Knowm, as the startup that Nugent has just uncloaked, has not cornered the market on the idea of using electronic storage devices as a kind of proxy for synapses in the brain.